Psychology: Cause and effects

Better than average at driving? Yep, something like 80% of us are.

This is a story of three “ effects”. Apparently, ignorance is bliss. If we imagine ourselves travelling ignorantly (but blissfully) through life, there will be times when our ignorance stops us getting things right and we’ll, um, get things wrong. But worse than that, according to researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger, we are doubly cursed by our ignorance. Our incompetence means we deal poorly with tasks life sets before us, and because of our incompetence, we’re not even in a good position to recognise we’re incompetent. In proposing what has come to be called the Dunning-Kruger effect, these two draw on the words of Charles Darwin: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

This is great news for most of us. It answers the question we have often asked ourselves: why do stupid people not realise they’re stupid? Well, they’re stupid, of course. There is a catch, though, as there are other “effects” we need to bear in mind. For instance, the “better-than-average effect”, which describes the phenomenon that most of us tend to think we’re better than average at whatever it is we’re being asked about. Better than average at driving? Yep, something like 80% of us are. You can see the problem; we can’t all be better than average. If we follow this slippery slope downwards, it means at least some of us are chortling at the ignorance of others while oblivious to our own. This better-than-average effect is pretty ubiquitous – it shows up in self-evaluations of job performance, popularity, the extent to which we think we are virtuous (defined however you want) and, of course, intelligence. Students – traditional prey for psychological researchers – have been shown to estimate their own IQ at an average of 120, whereas the general population are relatively more self-effacing at around 108.

IQ (intelligence quotient) tests are “normed” to a bell curve where the average is 100. It should be clear that if the people who take part in these studies are representative of the population, then there’s something funny going on here. And it gets worse. Blokes appear particularly susceptible to overestimating their own intelligence (as much as nine points higher than women), but this might also underestimate the size of the overestimate, as genuinely smart people tend to underestimate how smart they are. If you really are good at something, you tend to assume other people are more competent than they perhaps are, and therefore may not realise how good you are. Another reliable finding is that people routinely believe their generation is a little smarter than their parents’ generation, and certainly much more than their grandparents’. This, perhaps, isn’t quite as silly.

Now for our third “effect”, and one New Zealanders can lay some claim to – the Flynn effect, which refers to the pattern of increasing IQ scores over time. Jim Flynn is a fascinating character, an emeritus professor jointly in the departments of psychology and political science at the University of Otago. In the early 80s (about the same time other people started noticing something funny was going on), Flynn noted successive generations were scoring higher on IQ tests than their predecessors. For example, a group of 18-year-olds in 1980 would score around three points higher than 18-year-olds who had completed the same test 10 years earlier.

So, what does this mean? That we’re smarter now than we were 50 years ago? This is where the debate continues, and a range of potential explanations has been offered: maybe it’s because we spend more time in school than we used to, our nutrition is better, our environments more stimulating and less toxic to intelligence or maybe we really are smarter. Not to mention that, thanks to those annoying internet pop-ups, we’re exposed to more IQ-type tasks than ever before.

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